Basic astronomical data

Having an orbital period of 164.79 years, Neptune has circled the Sun only once since its discovery in September 1846. Consequently, astronomers expect to be making refinements in calculating its orbital size and shape well into the 21st century. Voyager 2’s encounter with Neptune resulted in a small upward revision of the planet’s estimated mean distance from the Sun, which is now thought to be 4,498,250,000 km (2,795,083,000 miles). Its orbital eccentricity of 0.0086 is the second lowest of the planets; only Venus’s orbit is more circular. Neptune’s rotation axis is tipped toward its orbital plane by 29.6°, somewhat larger than Earth’s 23.4°. As on Earth, the axial tilt gives rise to seasons on Neptune, and, because of the circularity of Neptune’s orbit, the seasons (and the seasons of its moons) are of nearly equal length, each nearly 41 years in duration.

Neptune’s rotation period was established when Voyager 2 detected radio bursts associated with the planet’s magnetic field and having a period of 16.11 hours. This value was inferred to be the rotation period at the level of the planet’s interior where the magnetic field is rooted. Neptune’s equatorial diameter measured at the one-bar pressure level (the pressure of Earth’s atmosphere at sea level) is 49,528 km (30,775 miles), which is only about 3 percent shy of the diameter of Uranus. Because of a flattening of the poles caused by the planet’s relatively fast rotation, Neptune’s polar diameter is 848 km (527 miles) less than its diameter at the equator. Although Neptune occupies a little less volume than Uranus, owing to its greater density—1.64 grams per cubic cm, compared with about 1.3 for Uranus—Neptune’s mass is 18 percent higher. For additional orbital and physical data about Neptune, see the table.

Like the other giant planets, Neptune’s outer atmosphere is composed predominantly of hydrogen and helium. Near the one-bar pressure level in the atmosphere, these two gases contribute nearly 98 percent of the atmospheric molecules. Most of the remaining molecules consist of methane gas. Hydrogen and helium are nearly invisible, but methane strongly absorbs red light. Sunlight reflected off Neptune’s clouds therefore exits the atmosphere with most of its red colours removed and so has a bluish cast. Although Uranus’s blue-green colour is also the result of atmospheric methane, Neptune’s colour is a more vivid, brighter blue, presumably an effect of the presence of an unidentified atmospheric gas.

The temperature of Neptune’s atmosphere varies with altitude. A minimum temperature of about 50 kelvins (K; −370 °F, −223 °C) occurs at a pressure near 0.1 bar. The temperature increases with decreasing pressure—i.e., with increasing altitude—to about 750 K (890 °F, 480 °C) at a pressure of a hundred-billionth of a bar, which corresponds to an altitude of 2,000 km (1,240 miles) as measured from the one-bar level, and it remains uniform above that altitude. Temperatures also increase with increasing depth below the 0.1-bar level to about 7,000 K (12,000 °F, 6,700 °C) near the centre of the planet, where the pressure may reach five megabars. The total amount of energy radiated by Neptune is equivalent to that of a nonreflecting sphere of the same size with a uniform temperature of 59.3 K (−353 °F, −214 °C). This temperature is called the effective temperature.

Neptune is more than 50 percent farther from the Sun than is Uranus and so receives less than half the sunlight of the latter. Yet the effective temperatures of these two giant planets are nearly equal. Uranus and Neptune each reflect—and hence also must absorb—about the same proportion of the sunlight that reaches them. As a result of processes not fully understood, Neptune emits more than twice the energy that it receives from the Sun. The added energy is generated in Neptune’s interior. Uranus, by contrast, has little energy escaping from its interior.

At the one-bar reference level, the mean temperature of Neptune’s atmosphere is roughly 74 K (−326 °F, −199 °C). Atmospheric temperatures are a few degrees warmer at the equator and poles than at mid-latitudes. This is probably an indication that air currents are rising near mid-latitudes and descending near the equator and poles. This vertical flow may extend to great heights within the atmosphere. A more vertically confined horizontal wind system exists near the cloud tops. As with the other giant planets, Neptune’s atmospheric circulation exhibits zonal flow—the winds are constrained to blow generally along lines of constant latitude (east-west) and are relatively invariable with time. Winds on Neptune range from about 100 metres per second (360 km [220 miles] per hour) in an easterly direction (prograde, or in the same direction as the planet’s spin) near latitude 70° S to as high as 700 metres per second (2,520 km [1,570 miles] per hour) in a westerly direction (retrograde, or opposite to the planet’s spin) near latitude 20° S.

The high winds and relatively large amount of escaping internal heat may be responsible for the turbulence observed in Neptune’s visible atmosphere by Voyager 2. Two large dark ovals were clearly visible in Voyager images of Neptune’s southern hemisphere. The largest, called the Great Dark Spot because of its similarity in latitude and shape to Jupiter’sGreat Red Spot, is comparable to Earth in size. It was near this storm system that the highest wind speeds were measured. Jupiter’s Great Red Spot has been seen in Earth-based telescopes for more than 150 years. Neptune’s Great Dark Spot was expected by analogy to be similarly long-lived. Scientists thus were surprised by its absence from images of Neptune obtained by the Earth-orbiting Hubble Space Telescope in 1991, only two years after the Voyager flyby, just as they were by the appearance of a comparable dark spot in Neptune’s northern hemisphere in 1994. Bright cloud features seen in the Voyager images are even more transient; they may be methane ice clouds created by strong upward motions of pockets of methane gas to higher, colder altitudes in the atmosphere, where the gas then condenses to ice crystals.

Animation of Neptune's Great Dark Spot, based on still images taken by Voyager 2 over a period of four and a half days as it approached the planet in August 1989. The greatest changes in the feature occur on its western and eastern edges (left and right, respectively) and suggest that the spot rotates counterclockwise. In one frame, which captures the spot near the edge of Neptune's disk, black space appears in the upper right corner.Photo NASA/JPL/Caltech (NASA photo # PIA00045)

Neptune is the only giant planet to display cloud shadows cast by high dispersed clouds on a lower, more continuous cloud bank. The higher clouds, probably composed of methane ice crystals, are generally located 50–100 km (30–60 miles) above the main cloud deck, which may be composed of ice crystals of ammonia or hydrogen sulfide. Like the other giant planets, Neptune is thought to possess cloud layers at deeper levels, below those visible to Voyager’s remote sensing instruments, but their composition is dependent on the relative amounts of gases composed of compounds of sulfur and nitrogen. Clouds of water ice are expected to occur at depths within Neptune’s atmosphere where the pressure exceeds 100 bars.

Clouds in Neptune's northern hemisphere, as observed by the Voyager 2 spacecraft in August 1989 about two hours before its closest approach to the planet. The cloud bands stretch latitudinally and at their tallest are about 50 km (30 miles) high. Illuminated by sunlight from the left, they cast shadows onto the underlying cloud deck.NASA/JPL/Caltech

Neptune, like most of the other planets in the solar system, possesses an internally generated magnetic field, first detected in 1989 by Voyager 2. Like Earth’s magnetic field, Neptune’s field can be represented approximately by that of a dipole (similar to a bar magnet), but its polarity is essentially opposite to that of Earth’s present field. A magnetic compass on Neptune would point toward south instead of north. Earth’s field is thought to be generated by electric currents flowing in its liquid iron core, and electric currents flowing within the outer cores of liquid metallic hydrogen in Jupiter and Saturn may similarly be the source of their magnetic fields. The magnetic fields of Earth, Jupiter, and Saturn are relatively well centred within the respective planets and aligned within about 12° of the planetary rotation axes. Uranus and Neptune, by contrast, have magnetic fields that are tilted from their rotation axes by almost 59° and 47°, respectively. Furthermore, the fields are not internally well centred. Uranus’s field is offset by 31 percent of the planet’s radius. Neptune’s field, having an offset of 55 percent of the radius, is centred in a portion of the interior that is actually closer to the cloud tops than to the planetary centre. The unusual configurations of the magnetic fields of Uranus and Neptune have led scientists to speculate that these fields may be generated in processes occurring in the upper layers of the planetary interiors. (See alsoUranus: The magnetic field and magnetosphere.)

The magnetic field of Neptune (and of the other planets) is approximately apple-shaped, with the stem end and the opposite end oriented in the directions of the magnetic poles. The solar wind, a stream of electrically charged particles that flows outward from the Sun, distorts that regular shape, compressing it on the sunward side of the planet and stretching it into a long tail in the direction away from the Sun. Trapped within the magnetic field are charged particles, predominantly protons and electrons. The region of space dominated by Neptune’s magnetic field and charged particles is called its magnetosphere. Because of the high tilt of Neptune’s magnetic field, the particles trapped in the magnetosphere are repeatedly swept past the orbits of the moons and rings. Many of these particles may be absorbed by the moons and ring material, effectively emptying from the magnetosphere a large fraction of its charged particle content. Neptune’s magnetosphere is populated with fewer protons and electrons per unit volume than that of any other giant planet. Near the magnetic poles, the charged particles in the magnetosphere can travel along magnetic field lines into the atmosphere. As they collide with gases there, they cause those gases to fluoresce, resulting in classical, albeit weak, auroras.

Interior structure and composition

Although Neptune has a mean density slightly less than 30 percent of Earth’s, it is the densest of the giant planets. This implies that a larger percentage of Neptune’s interior is composed of melted ices and molten rocky materials than is the case for the other giant planets.

The distribution of these heavier elements and compounds is poorly known. Voyager 2 data suggest that Neptune is unlikely to have a distinct inner core of molten rocky materials surrounded by an outer core of melted ices of methane, ammonia, and water. The relatively slow rotation of 16.11 hours measured by Voyager was about one hour longer than would be expected from such a layered interior model. Scientists have concluded that the heavier compounds and elements, rather than being centrally condensed, may be spread almost uniformly throughout the interior. In this respect, as in many others, Neptune resembles Uranus far more than it does the larger giants Jupiter and Saturn. (For additional discussion of layered and mixed models as they apply to the Uranian interior, seeUranus: The interior.)

The large fraction of Neptune’s total heat budget derived from the planet’s interior may not necessarily imply that Neptune is hotter at its centre than Uranus. Multiple stratified layers in the deep Uranian atmosphere may serve to insulate the interior, trapping within the planet the radiation that more readily escapes from Neptune. Images of Uranus from Earth as Uranus approaches an equinox and thus as the Sun begins to illuminate the equatorial regions more directly seem to show an increasingly active atmosphere. This may imply that discrete atmospheric activity on both Uranus and Neptune is more dependent on solar radiation than on the relative amounts of heat escaping from the interior.

Evolution

In the most commonly accepted model of the solar system’s formation, the Nice Model (named after the French city where it was first postulated), the four giant planets—Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune—orbited between about 5 and 17 astronomical units (1 astronomical unit is about 150 million km [93 million miles], the mean distance of Earth from the Sun). The planets were in orbital resonances. For example, if Neptune was in the 3:4 resonance, for every three times Neptune orbited around the Sun, Uranus would orbit four. The planets orbited in a disk of planetesimals, small bodies left over from the formation of the solar system. Gravitational interactions with these planetesimals, of which several hundred were the size of the dwarf planetPluto, knocked the planets out of their orbital resonances and increased the eccentricity of their orbits. The orbits of the planets became unstable, and Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune migrated outward to their current positions. In some simulations, Uranus and Neptune even switch positions. (Jupiter migrated slightly inward.) The planetesimal disk was dispersed, which caused the Late Heavy Bombardment, an event of heavy cratering on the inner terrestrial planets that happened about four billion years ago. A small remnant of the disk became the Kuiper belt, and some planetesimals were captured to became Neptune’s Trojan asteroids (see next section).